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A thread presumably about [Giant Bomb]

Posts

95% of my music collection are game and movie soundtracks. Good music can heavily impact my enjoyment of a movie or game, so yeah, I love me some soundtracks (though I'm not fond of the sound-alike trend of the past decade...).

I'm basically in this camp. I have mostly soundtracks since I much prefer the ambience and listening to it really helps my mind and my imagination drift away from whatever mundane shit I'm doing, like standing on the bus on the morning commute, and regular pop music doesn't do that for me

The two soundtracks I currently have on loop for are Tekken 7 and Cuphead, and last year I crossed off attending a Distant Worlds concert from my bucket list. Music was always a big part of my life and Final Fantasy music is what drew me deep into videogames in the first place.

Also, as an aside the Mummy Demastered the guys gave a shoutout to last year has some real good bangers

Apart from being a cracking fighting game and maybe the best tekken yet that soundtrack is killer.

Seriously banging and sets the mood perfectly.

Namco Sound Team are some of the best in the business. People went apeshit about Nier Automata's soundtrack but honestly Keiichi Okabe was producing good shit long before that alongside the likes of Tohyama and Miyake.

The QL for Katamari Damacy Rerolled reminded me how fucking astounding that group is but because their output tends to be done collaboratively they don't get nearly enough credit individually

I've never played Vanquish, but I know that Jeff is a fan. But I never played the game, myself. And I wondered what the source of this person's ire was, so I did some digging. Turns out Game Informer reviewed the game at release, gave it a 7.75 and complained about the short length. Take a look at who wrote the review!

a) Why is he bringing this up again now, over 8 years after that review came out?

b) Dan literally only mentioned the length once in passing, after making it clear that his main issue with the game was that he just didn't think it was very fun even in the short amount of time it took to play through.

I'm not sure how much he can fault Dan if a bunch of people decided to latch onto the length thing when all Dan said about it was one sentence saying it was short. Game length definitely matters (not that longer is always better, but it should always be discussed), but even then Dan wasn't exactly putting a ton of emphasis on it.

Again, complete sympathy for the shit game devs have to deal with, but that seems a little overly bitter to me?

I think when I consider game length I'm also making a judgment call on overall raw value. Length is fine as long as it's of good quality and it's priced appropriately, and given the price of a videogame can be so variable, determining the value proposition for a videogame based on its length is such a nebulous thing to do.

I shamefully admit I didn't play vanquish original cause it was supposedly so short.

Then it was one of the best games I ever played.

Yeah man, I tell ya what, man, that dang ol' internet, man, you just go in on there and point and click, talk about w-w-dot-w-com, mean you got the naked chicks on there, man, just go click, click, click, click, click, it's real easy, man.

There is so much Destiny 2 talk on this week's Beastcast. Absolutely none of it (an hour in at least) has to do with the Bungie divorcing Activision news, because they almost certainly recorded before that hit.

I hear length discussed all the time when it comes to runtime on movies. That's not including things like 'this needed heavy editing'. I see a lot of "thank god this was under 90 minutes" and "this movie was about 45 minutes too long."

Vanquish is one of those games where I didnt play it at the time because reaction was mediocre and I think I tried the demo and the controls were a bit off. But it seems to have a cult following that made me want to give it another shot.

a) Why is he bringing this up again now, over 8 years after that review came out?

b) Dan literally only mentioned the length once in passing, after making it clear that his main issue with the game was that he just didn't think it was very fun even in the short amount of time it took to play through.

I'm not sure how much he can fault Dan if a bunch of people decided to latch onto the length thing when all Dan said about it was one sentence saying it was short. Game length definitely matters (not that longer is always better, but it should always be discussed), but even then Dan wasn't exactly putting a ton of emphasis on it.

Again, complete sympathy for the shit game devs have to deal with, but that seems a little overly bitter to me?

The thing with Vanquish is that it looks like a Gears clone, but if you play it like one you'll have a bad time.

The only time you should be stationary behind cover is to look awesome as you take a quick smoke break. Then it's back to Mario Kart shooty action, wherein your upper torso is Mario and your knees are the kart.

Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.

Even though I don't have kids, as an grown adult I find myself preferring games that are only 5-10 hours. And shorter than that is fine too!

I have a ton of JRPGs from the past 25 years that I want to play, but it takes a lot to get me to do it. A few weeks ago I duped myself into playing an NES JRPG because howlongtobeat said it was only 4-5 hours. But that was based on one person's reporting their time; it took me 25-30 hours. Whoops.

ugh as i've said many time, as a father with 2 kids (who are 2 and 4) i wish more games were an amazing 6 hours than a piddling 20 hours.

red dead 2 was my goty but it took special effort to put 60 hours into that and to do that i had to not do basically anything else for a number of weeks. i can do that maybe once a year.

I stopped playing all games to just fucking beat RDR2, so much so that I was ANGRY it was so long, it was insulting me by being longer. To be fair, a good portion of this is just how the game is built, I knew if I stepped away, I'd murder so many horses and townsfolk accidentally after playing a game with good controls.

But yeah, give me a tight, well-made, 6-12 hour game and I'm good, I'll play a lot of those, thank you very much. I can actually get through those when the kids are asleep.

The thing with Vanquish is that it looks like a Gears clone, but if you play it like one you'll have a bad time.

The only time you should be stationary behind cover is to look awesome as you take a quick smoke break. Then it's back to Mario Kart shooty action, wherein your upper torso is Mario and your knees are the kart.

IIRC, doesn't the cigarette button actually have a game play use, as some enemies are heatseeking? So you throw a lit cigarette and it distracts them or messes with their weapons targeting system.

The thing with Vanquish is that it looks like a Gears clone, but if you play it like one you'll have a bad time.

The only time you should be stationary behind cover is to look awesome as you take a quick smoke break. Then it's back to Mario Kart shooty action, wherein your upper torso is Mario and your knees are the kart.

IIRC, doesn't the cigarette button actually have a game play use, as some enemies are heatseeking? So you throw a lit cigarette and it distracts them or messes with their weapons targeting system.

I'm not sure, but I wouldn't doubt it. I haven't played Vanquish in a few years, but I remember smoking healed you. I'm probably remembering wrong, but it just looked sweet when you took a smoke break as your cover crumbled, then he just flicks it away like "whelp, back to it I guess"

Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.

a) Why is he bringing this up again now, over 8 years after that review came out?

b) Dan literally only mentioned the length once in passing, after making it clear that his main issue with the game was that he just didn't think it was very fun even in the short amount of time it took to play through.

I'm not sure how much he can fault Dan if a bunch of people decided to latch onto the length thing when all Dan said about it was one sentence saying it was short. Game length definitely matters (not that longer is always better, but it should always be discussed), but even then Dan wasn't exactly putting a ton of emphasis on it.

Again, complete sympathy for the shit game devs have to deal with, but that seems a little overly bitter to me?

Also, a 7.75 is not a bad game score at all.

In the very stupid scaling of video game reviews, isn’t something lower than an 8 considered a failure?

Also a lot of bonuses are dependent on absurdly high metacritic scores so getting a low one means a lot less reward for a shitload of hard work.

a) Why is he bringing this up again now, over 8 years after that review came out?

b) Dan literally only mentioned the length once in passing, after making it clear that his main issue with the game was that he just didn't think it was very fun even in the short amount of time it took to play through.

I'm not sure how much he can fault Dan if a bunch of people decided to latch onto the length thing when all Dan said about it was one sentence saying it was short. Game length definitely matters (not that longer is always better, but it should always be discussed), but even then Dan wasn't exactly putting a ton of emphasis on it.

Again, complete sympathy for the shit game devs have to deal with, but that seems a little overly bitter to me?

Also, a 7.75 is not a bad game score at all.

In the very stupid scaling of video game reviews, isn’t something lower than an 8 considered a failure?

Also a lot of bonuses are dependent on absurdly high metacritic scores so getting a low one means a lot less reward for a shitload of hard work.

a) Why is he bringing this up again now, over 8 years after that review came out?

b) Dan literally only mentioned the length once in passing, after making it clear that his main issue with the game was that he just didn't think it was very fun even in the short amount of time it took to play through.

I'm not sure how much he can fault Dan if a bunch of people decided to latch onto the length thing when all Dan said about it was one sentence saying it was short. Game length definitely matters (not that longer is always better, but it should always be discussed), but even then Dan wasn't exactly putting a ton of emphasis on it.

Again, complete sympathy for the shit game devs have to deal with, but that seems a little overly bitter to me?

Also, a 7.75 is not a bad game score at all.

In the very stupid scaling of video game reviews, isn’t something lower than an 8 considered a failure?

Also a lot of bonuses are dependent on absurdly high metacritic scores so getting a low one means a lot less reward for a shitload of hard work.

Absurdly high review score bonuses is not something that the reviewer should take into consideration when making their review.

Also I thought that practice had died off cause it was blatant bullshit?

a) Why is he bringing this up again now, over 8 years after that review came out?

b) Dan literally only mentioned the length once in passing, after making it clear that his main issue with the game was that he just didn't think it was very fun even in the short amount of time it took to play through.

I'm not sure how much he can fault Dan if a bunch of people decided to latch onto the length thing when all Dan said about it was one sentence saying it was short. Game length definitely matters (not that longer is always better, but it should always be discussed), but even then Dan wasn't exactly putting a ton of emphasis on it.

Again, complete sympathy for the shit game devs have to deal with, but that seems a little overly bitter to me?

Also, a 7.75 is not a bad game score at all.

In the very stupid scaling of video game reviews, isn’t something lower than an 8 considered a failure?

Also a lot of bonuses are dependent on absurdly high metacritic scores so getting a low one means a lot less reward for a shitload of hard work.

Absurdly high review score bonuses is not something that the reviewer should take into consideration when making their review.

Also I thought that practice had died off cause it was blatant bullshit?

No way. It's definitely still around. It was a factor in the dev or RDR2 for sure.

Thinking about it, I can’t even remember the last time I read a written review in advance of a release, let alone used one as the basis for a purchasing decision. I pretty much just get my reviews in podcast form these days. Alex talking about Nier sold me on Nier, not IGN or Polygon.

The current gaming space feels so risk-averse and formulaic, I feel like I can just look at a list of upcoming games and be able to point at the ones I know I’ll play and enjoy. The Florences of the world come to me purely by word of mouth.